"These songs are simultaneously pristine, raw and free. They feel like they always existed. They make you, too, feel pristine and raw and free when they wash over you. Such is great music, seemingly inevitable. They were massaged through countless rehearsals in mine and Joey’s living room in New Orleans. When the band would come to play, we’d move out the furniture, and — exhausted from the grind of endless barely-paying gigs — the band would put aside the psychic trauma attached to being a working musician in New Orleans. Instead they allowed their spirit the freedom and exploration that brought them to music. I bore witness to their rehearsal space as a salve for creative spirits under siege.

This record was anything but inevitable.

It was not a large apartment, but I never closed the door when they rehearsed. We left that apartment together, a necessary stepping stone on the path of this record. The songs were born — but unrecorded and unmoored. These songs, explorations of freedom, were mixed and cut together in painful isolation, far from free. Yet this record finally came to be and found a home in your ears.

So much of what reaches our ears is driven by its capacity to sell us something. That these songs were created to speak, and not to sell, sings through every track like an invitation from a friend. This record is a gift, humans turned inside-out to show you what is shared in our experience.

In this world, that is a Vexed Perspective."

Lecco Morris, October 2022

"Vexed Perspective was born out of the University of New Orleans where Xavier, Gregg, Austin and I all went to school. Peter, the fifth member, was a friend of mine from my earliest days in New Orleans. Most of this music was composed there, with AIDTRT?, Mauve Avenger, and Beta Wave all debuted at UNO. Some of these songs were written as far back as 2016 and felt very old even by the time we cut these recordings. We came together over our mutual desire to create something musical beyond the boundaries of the New Orleans music scene in which we were all active players.
Our first recording session took place in 2017, before Gregg and Austin joined. The last dub was done in August 2022, by which point I had been living in India for nearly a year.

During all this time, the project was sidelined because of health issues, incomplete recordings, the impact of the pandemic, my graduate study and my immigration to India. However soon after arrival, I faced difficulties with my visa and was essentially exiled to Sri Lanka while working to fix these problems. The isolation from everyone I had ever known and loved for a quarter of a year was devastating, but presented an opportunity to immerse myself in solitary self reflection. The impetus to complete this long overdue project came to me out of the blue, and over these months, I carved out the mixes painstakingly on my laptop while I struggled desperately to escape.

For me, this music is about believing that we can transcend the harshness of the world, passing through its intricacies like light through a prism. Light makes the dark things known, it causes flowers to bloom, it allows us to reflect. And light, like sound, also touches us and moves us ever so subtly. I hope this music stirs something within you too."

-Joey van Leeuwen